CNN "The Situation Room" - Transcript: Interview With Rep. Adam Schiff

Interview

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Joining us now, the lead impeachment manager for the House of Representatives, the Intelligence Committee chairman, Adam Schiff.

Mr. Chairman, thank you so much for joining us.

REP. ADAM SCHIFF (D-CA): Good to be with you, Wolf.

BLITZER: All right, so you just took this truly historic walk from the House of Representatives to the U.S. Senate with the articles of impeachment, the two articles of impeachment in the hands of House clerk.

What does this moment mean for the country?

SCHIFF: Well, obviously, this is something that is rarely happened in history.

It has been, I think, only three occasions where the impeachment of a president has gotten to this stage. And that's for good reason.

We expect, I think, that only the most serious abuses, those that threaten the oath of office, the constitutional structure that our founders presented, will reach this point. And, here, what you had -- you had a president trying to withhold millions in military aid to an ally at war to try to get help in cheating in the next election.

That is very much what the framers had in mind for these circumstances. So we feel the weight of history. We feel that we are carrying out the will of the framers of our Constitution. And that's a pretty serious load to carry.

BLITZER: It certainly is.

The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, you heard him a little while ago. He directed you and your House managers to come back tomorrow to formally begin the impeachment trial. He wants you back at noon Eastern.

So why did this notification happen tonight? Walk us through this process.

SCHIFF: Well, the way the process works is, when the articles are passed, and when the resolution to effectuate them passes, as it did today, then they're immediately transmitted to the Senate.

And the Senate schedules the date for the formal reading of the articles. And the Senate has scheduled that for tomorrow at noon. So, we will go back to the Senate chamber. We will read the articles. We will then be dismissed for a couple hours.

And the senators will then come in and take their oath, as well as the chief justice. And that will probably be it for tomorrow.

And then the trial will begin, as I understand it, in earnest on Tuesday of next week.

BLITZER: You will be serving as the lead impeachment manager.

The speaker says she was looking for impeachment managers who can litigate this kind of case.

So, what strengths do you and the other six managers bring to this trial?

SCHIFF: Well, there's a lot of experience among the six of us.

[18:10:03]

I had the experience of actually being lead impeachment House manager in the last impeachment in the Senate, which was the impeachment of a corrupt federal judge, who was convicted on each of the articles.

And I served as a prosecutor for many years in Los Angeles.

My other colleagues also have a variety of everything, from courtroom experience, to other experience with impeachment. Zoe Lofgren, for example, was a staff member on the Hill during the Nixon impeachment. She was a Judiciary Committee member during the Clinton impeachment. And now she's a House manager during the Trump impeachment.

Others bring other experience. Jason Crow, an Army Ranger, brings his military experience in talking about how important it was for Ukraine to get this military aid to fight off the Russians, a conflict that has claimed about 15,000 Ukrainian lives, having someone with a military background that can speak to that.

We wanted members to reflect the geographical and diversity of the country. So, it's, I think, a very good team that the speaker is assembled with the right skills and representative of the country.

BLITZER: You in the House Intelligence Committee have just released more documents from Lev Parnas, the indicted business partner of Rudy Giuliani, the president's personal attorney, including voice-mails.

What can you tell us about these new materials?

SCHIFF: Well, among the more significant things are a letter that Giuliani wrote to the president of Ukraine seeking a meeting to discuss a particular matter.

That, of course, were the investigations he wanted done of Joe Biden. And, in that letter, the president's attorney says he is undertaking these actions with the knowledge and consent of his client.

So we don't know what the president's defense is going to be, because it keeps changing. Mostly, it's an effort to deflect.

But if the president should try to say, well, I had no idea what Rudy Giuliani was doing or throw him or Gordon Sondland or someone else under the bus to declaim responsibility for a scheme that he was orchestrating, here is very graphic documentary proof that, no, Giuliani was your agent. You knew what he was doing. It's there in writing for all to see.

And this underscores, Wolf, the importance of documents. Witnesses may tell the truth, and witnesses may lie, but documents generally tell the very straight story.

The White House has been sitting on hundreds and hundreds of documents that they refuse to release to Congress. The senators should demand them. If they're going to follow the Clinton model, which they really haven't, all of those documents were turned over before the trial. They should make that evidence available to the senators and to the House managers.

BLITZER: I know you -- you and your staff, you have released hundreds of pages, new documents tonight. Are you still going through them? Are they still being translated? Give us the upshot of how significant potentially they might be in

convincing some, let's say, moderate Republican senators to vote in favor of getting new evidence, allowing witnesses to appear.

SCHIFF: Well, there's a tremendous volume of documents and materials that Mr. Parnas has turned over to us.

We are still going through them, Wolf, because there's such a great volume. Many of them are in Russian, and they had to be translated. And, fortunately, we have members of our staff that can help do that.

But there is still a great many other documents to go through. And it's not just what we got from Lev Parnas. Of course, we have seen successive disclosures of documents as a result of Freedom of Information Act litigation that has shed light on the fact that, at the Office of Management and Budget, when they were holding up the military assistance to Ukraine, nobody had an explanation for why.

Those documents make it clear the order came from the president through Mick Mulvaney, that they were worried about the legality of what they were doing. In fact, that corroborate testimony we have that two OMB officials resigned because of their concerns about the legality of what was happening.

So these documents are obviously very important, illuminating, corroborating.

And if the senators are serious in taking their oath to be impartial, they're going to want a fair trial. They're going to want to see the evidence.

Mr. McConnell would like to characterize what goes on in the Senate as not a trial at all, but, rather, the appeal from a trial in the House, where the record is set.

But, of course, that's not what's in the Constitution. The founders didn't say, the House tries and, the Senate, here's the appeal. No, they said the House charges, the House impeaches, and the Senate tries.

The senators, like in every other trial in America and in every other impeachment in history, should get the documents and hear the witnesses themselves.

BLITZER: One of the more moderate Republican senators, Susan Collins of Maine, is now questioning why this is only just being revealed right now.

She suggested this means you and your House colleagues did an incomplete job. Those are her words.

If she is skeptical of this new information, how likely is it that it will be included in the Senate trial?

[18:15:03] SCHIFF: Well, what the senators need to realize -- and we hope to inform them of this during the trial -- that the reason why we haven't had documents up until now is because the president has refused to turn them over.

So, if Senator Collins or other senators are interested in the documents or why they haven't been available yet, they should turn those questions to the White House and say, why are you hiding this? Why are you holding this back? Why aren't you releasing this information?

If you're going to claim that somehow the president should be exonerated, show us the proof.

In terms of Lev Parnas, he was subpoenaed. He refused to provide the documents. He was indicted. He made a decision -- after getting rid of the lawyer Dowd, who also represented Donald Trump, he made a decision to cooperate and started providing the documents.

So this was the soonest we could get them. That's not a justification for any senator to just say, well, why didn't the House have them before? There's a very good reason we didn't have them before. The real question is, why aren't they asking the president to release the documents that he has?

BLITZER: The new evidence that has now been released by the House includes text messages that appear to show some sort of surveillance by a man named Robert Hyde, and a possible threat to Marie Yovanovitch, the ousted U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.

I'm curious, Mr. Chairman, how do you interpret these text messages?

SCHIFF: You know, I can't -- I have to say it's deeply disturbing to see that it looks like someone had the ambassador under surveillance, that there were implicit or potential threats to the ambassador.

And we don't know where those originated or the explanation for them, but we're determined to find out.

BLITZER: Lev Parnas, the associate of Rudy Giuliani, he's about to speak publicly on television. His lawyer says he's been making his case with a flash social media campaign that's been ongoing.

The lawyer has been doing it. Do you believe Lev Parnas is a reliable witness?

SCHIFF: Now, I don't want to make any judgments about his credibility or others until we have the opportunity to flesh that out.

But I will say this. The documents that he has been willing to provide have been very informative and very important. So, we appreciate that cooperation. We think it is shedding important new light on the president's scheme, and when it got started, and Rudy Giuliani's role and the role of others.

We're seeing how just deeply troubling that is, including, as you say, indications that the ambassador who was the subject of this vicious smear campaign was being surveilled.

It may shed light, for example, on a call that she had with a high State Department official back in Washington, who said, you need to be out on the next plane. We're concerned about your security.

She didn't understand what that was about. These new documents may shed light on just how well-founded those concerns were.

BLITZER: Yes, I have gone through some of those documents, and they are very disturbing.

As you know, four Republican senators have now said they're open to witnesses in the Senate trial, Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitt Romney of Utah.

Are you confident that these senators will stick to their word, potentially vote with you? You need 51 senators to allow witnesses to appear. Right now, there are 47 Democrats. If all of them stay firm, you need 51 to get witnesses.

What do you think?

SCHIFF: Look, I hope all the senators, not just these four, take their oath seriously.

They're going to be sworn in. They're going to be sworn to an oath that requires them to be impartial. I think, if they're truly impartial, they're going to want to have a fair trial, fair to the president and fair to the American people.

They're going to want witnesses. They're going to want to see the documents. So I hope they're going to take that oath seriously.

I would also remind the senators, when they're making these decisions, that this information is going to come out anyway. If they don't vote to make these documents available, just as we are seeing over the last three or four weeks, the information is going to come out anyway.

And at some point, if they vote against witnesses and documents, they're going to have to explain, when the new evidence does come out, why did they oppose hearing this when it would have made a difference during the impeachment trial? Why did they blind themselves to the truth?

And I wouldn't want to have to answer that question, having voted against a fair trial with witnesses and documents. So, this is going to come out. It ought to come out when it would really matter.

BLITZER: As you know, the president and some of his allies, they say they're ready to have witnesses as well.

[18:20:00]

And they cite Hunter Biden, for example, the whistle-blower, and you yourself. You have heard this from the president and others. Are there any circumstances, Mr. Chairman, under which you would make

a deal with the Republicans and agree to testify or agree to these other witnesses that the president wants?

SCHIFF: Well, in terms of my own testimony, this is really not a serious thing.

This is something the president used as a talking point. I'm not sure what my testimony would be, since I'm not a fact witness, except he's guilty, you should convict him. I'm not sure that's particularly helpful to the president.

But the desire to have Hunter Biden, for example, this is a desire just to continue the smear campaign that they sought to get the Ukrainians to do.

Hunter Biden doesn't have relevant information in this trial. The issue is, did the president withhold hundreds of millions of dollars to coerce Ukraine into helping him cheat in the election?

Hunter Biden can't tell us about the president's role in withholding that aid or what his corrupt motives were. Hunter Biden can't tell us why the president wouldn't need would the president of Ukraine, which was also leverage that Trump was using to try to get his Ukrainian counterpart to help him cheat in the election.

So, he's not a relevant fact witness. And I think this is basically the GOP's way of saying, yes, Bolton is relevant, yes, Mulvaney is relevant, yes, the people you want are relevant, but if you're going to get them, we're going to make you take someone who's not relevant that will help the president smear his opponent.

That's not taking their oath seriously. That is taking factionalism to a degree that the founders warned us about. And I just hope that they don't go there.

BLITZER: Congressman Adam Schiff, you have been very generous with your time on this truly historic day here in Washington, D.C.

Thank you so much for joining us.

SCHIFF: Thank you, Wolf.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source